Gulf Weekly Book Club

BOOK OF THE WEEK with Linda Jennings. Davina’s 5 Weeks To Sugar-Free, ISBN 9781472225283 (Orion) BD9.500 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

‘Hi, my name is Davina, and I’m a sugar addict ...’

Aren’t we all?

However, Davina McCall loves a challenge. And giving up sugar has been her toughest yet. In this beautiful cookbook, Davina shares her favourite super-healthy recipes that have helped her kick the sugar habit and cut out junk food for good. These recipes are easy to make but taste amazing and contain the foods that will help you look and feel great.

There are no long lists of scary, hard-to-find ingredients and the book has been very well received by popular women’s magazines such as Woman’s Own and Prima. However, please note that this is not a completely ‘no sugar’ book (if that is what you are searching for, I recommend I Quit Sugar by Sarah Wilson) as Davina replaces refined sugar with maple syrup or honey in a lot of the recipes. However, having now worked with someone who went ‘cold turkey’ on sugar a couple of weeks ago, I honestly think a gradual replacement plan that weans you off the stuff is probably kinder to other members of the family and workplace.

5 Weeks To Sugar-Free also includes a five-week meal planner that works towards curbing sweet cravings and cutting out all processed foods. Davina is no guru, she’s one of us, and so her plan also includes pudding recipes that help the most sweet-toothed chocoholic kick the added sugar habit.

Simple, delicious and brimming with flavour, these recipes will help you along the long hard road to eventually becoming sugar free.

* READ it now in paperback
A Lovely Way To Burn, Louise Welsh, ISBN 9781848546530 (John Murray) BD4.500  for Gulf Weekly Book Club members.

It doesn’t look like murder in a city full of death.

A pandemic called ‘The Sweats’ is sweeping the globe. London is a city in crisis. Hospitals begin to fill with the dead and dying, but Stevie Flint is convinced that the sudden death of her boyfriend Dr Simon Sharkey was not from natural causes. As roads out of London become gridlocked with people fleeing infection, Stevie’s search for Simon’s killers takes her in the opposite direction, into the depths of the dying city and a race with death.

A Lovely Way to Burn is the first outbreak in the Plague Times trilogy. Chilling, tense and completely compelling, it’s Louise Welsh playing on our worst fears whilst writing at the height of her powers.

Read on Radio 4 Book at Bedtime I am not sure this would be a soothing way to fall asleep as it is seriously scary – too near to what has been happening for my liking but if you like a frightening read, this is the novel for you and I would be very surprised if, as soon as the final two books are printed, this dystopian thriller doesn’t end up on the big screen.

* MY favourite read-of-the-week
After The Bombing, Clare Morrall, ISBN 9781444736465 (Sceptre) BD5 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members.

There has been a plethora of WW2 fiction I know, but I read this tightly-woven novel (which opens in May 1942 with a bombing raid on Exeter) as it initially reminded me of the experience of a friend’s daughter; who, having just left Bahrain to start boarding school at Christchurch, suffered the devastating earthquake.

So, although one disaster was man-made and the other a cruel force of nature, the impacts were the same – necessitating the girls to take shelter and emerge some hours later to find a scene of devastation all around them.

After the Bombing oscillates between the Second World War and the early Sixties, Morrall sets about evoking the war’s enduring effect on those who were left behind on the home front, too young to take part yet irrevocably shaped by it nonetheless.

Alma Braithwaite was a teenager in Exeter when her boarding school was bombed in 1942. Twenty-one years later, she remains alone in the house where she grew up, teaching music at her old school, unable to move on from the tragic events of the war.

It takes the arrival of an innovative new headmistress and a new pupil – the daughter of a man Alma hasn’t seen since 1942 – to bring back the painful yet exhilarating summer that followed the air-raids and jolt her out of the past. If you like watching Foyle’s War – I think you will love this book.